Alfred Hitchcock by Patrick McGilligan Page A

heart. In the years that followed, preparation and preproduction would become all the more crucial to his methodology. Storyboarding—sketching all the scenes in advance of filming—became standard policy. He felt keenly responsible for making films efficiently, according to budget. He was proud to be a “commercial” director, one who would turn a reliable profit for his producers.
    Greet’s generosity was another gesture he never forgot. Hitchcock had a soft spot for onetime leading ladies of the stage, whom he often called on for eccentric supporting roles. Greet would turn up in future Hitchcock films more than any other performer. *
    Undoubtedly there would have been an Alfred Hitchcock even if there had never been a British Famous Players-Lasky. But the director was forged in the crucible of Islington. His budding talent and buoyant, self-assured personality set him apart, and many of his signature ideas and techniques—not to mention long-standing relationships—dated to his first film job. Through thick and thin at Islington, Hitchcock slyly positioned himself at the very heart of the studio.
    Quite apart from what befell British Famous Players-Lasky, the early 1920s marked one in a series of precarious junctures in English film history, with several studios showing huge losses and teetering close to bankruptcy. England never had the wherewithal of Hollywood—the massive capital, the domestic audience numbers, the global marketing organization. But times of crisis always attracted brave young blood, and in the spring of 1923 several people who would loom large in Hitchcock’s future arrived at Islington.
    Michael Balcon and Victor Saville hailed from Birmingham, with backgrounds in film rentals. Saville had handled Midlands sales of the D. W. Griffith epics
The Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
, and after World War I he joined with the brothers Charles and Herbert Wilcox in a cinema-booking partnership. Saville and Balcon then formed a company to make advertising films, and coproduced their first short feature with a promising up-and-comer—the exhibitor Sidney Bernstein.
    One of Herbert Wilcox’s friends was a Newcastle upon Tyne exhibitornamed Jack Graham Cutts, another passionate D. W. Griffith promoter. When Wilcox made the plunge into feature production in 1919, he hired Cutts to direct his first picture,
The Wonderful Story.
Victor Saville was fortuitously married to the niece of C. M. Woolf, who owned England’s largest rental operation, W & F (named for Woolf and his partner, John M. Freedman). When Wilcox and Cutts split up, Balcon, Saville, and Jack Freedman—John M.’s son—formed a new company, and snapped up Cutts as their marquee director.
    Saville and Balcon were intelligent and well-bred. Over time Hitchcock would feel closer to Saville, a witty, artistic-minded kindred spirit who soon turned to directing, creating an underrated body of work in England and Hollywood. Balcon was more a born producer—after Alexander Korda, arguably the single most important in British film history—with an exemplary career that extended from Islington in 1923 to his final film in 1963. Cool and quick-witted, Balcon was a master businessman whose worldly salesmanship was sometimes at odds with his staunchly English (Michael Powell said “suburban”) sensibility. Hitchcock owed a lasting debt to Balcon, although over the years their relationship would sometimes be rocky.
    Not only did Balcon-Saville-Freedman find the financial backing they needed in England, they also traveled to the United States to pave the way for an American distribution deal with the Select Organization, run by Lewis Selznick. A scrappy motion picture production and distribution pioneer on the East Coast before World War I, Selznick had fallen on hard times by the early twenties, and was trying to reorganize. Eager for product, Select was willing to peddle inexpensive British features to a small eastern chain of U.S.